Nicole, Duchess of Bedford

Nicole, Duchess of Bedford, who has died in Monte Carlo aged 92, was the third
wife of Ian, 13th Duke of Bedford. From 1959, when the press first seized on
the story of their romance, until their sudden departure to France in 1974,
the Bedfords were seldom out of the news, flamboyantly leading the stately
home business as they promoted Woburn Abbey all over the world.

Nicole, Duchess of Bedford

6:35PM BST 13 Sep 2012

When Nicole married the Duke in 1960, he was already a well-known figure. His career was slight — he had dabbled in journalism and briefly served with the Coldstream Guards — and he had his allowance cut off by his father when he married a Mrs Clare Hollway in 1939. She died of an overdose in 1945, and he then married Mrs Lydia Lyle, with whom he moved to South Africa, returning to Britain only when his father shot himself in 1953. When he took on Woburn he was faced with £4.5 million in death duties, a problem he solved by opening the house to the public in 1955.

The Duke became — alongside the Marquess of Bath and Lord Montagu of Beaulieu — one of the great innovators among stately home owners. He promoted Woburn tirelessly, built a funfair, gave lectures, appeared on television and even allowed a nudist film to be shot on the estate. His aim was to turn the estate round and hand it on in good order to his son, Robin, Marquess of Tavistock. Having done so, in 1974 he and Nicole left England, eventually settling in Monte Carlo, amid relics of the jet set.

The Duchess proved the perfect associate in his mission: organised, energetic and possessed of considerable flair. She achieved a measure of fame on her own account when she published her memoirs, Nicole Nobody (1974), which featured a story about her being held captive in a Manchester hotel room for three days by a stranger “with a gentle-giant smile” who had proved himself “a superb lover”, bestowing on her “an awakening that every woman should experience”. Whether or not this was strictly true, the book was a success, selling more than a million copies.

Nicole Marie Charlotte Pierrette Jeanne Schneider was born in Paris on June 29 1920, the daughter of Paul Schneider, a First World War French flying ace, and his wife Marguerite Durand, whose father owned Les Fonderies de Creil, a cast-iron factory which made French coinage. On her mother’s side Nicole descended from a noble French family, the Crouzet de Rayssac des Roches. She was brought up at Chantilly-Creil, near Paris, attending a convent school in Neuilly.

When she was only 18 her father decided that she should marry Henri Milinaire, a 31-year-old painter whose father owned a steelworks and other businesses. In love with another man, Nicole became, in her own words, “the desolate bride of a man I did not love and never even came to know after marriage”. Nevertheless, she dutifully produced two sons and two daughters.

The man she loved, Michel Bompard, engaged her in Resistance activities during the Second World War: she conveyed messages and sometimes machine-gun parts past the German occupiers, occasionally using her children’s pram. She claimed to have been arrested on three occasions. She was miserable when Bompard died in a prison camp in 1945.

Short of money and increasingly independent of her husband, post-war she travelled across Europe to sell graphic designs for a Milinaire-owned company. She was good at the job, and found time for numerous extramarital adventures. She had a fortunate escape in 1947 when, at the last minute, she decided not to board an aircraft that crashed near Copenhagen, killing the Crown Prince of Sweden and the operatic soprano Grace Moore.

In the 1950s, having embarked on a liaison with the American producer Sheldon Reynolds, she left the world of retail and became a television producer, working on his celebrated Sherlock Holmes series which starred Ronald Howard and Howard Marion-Crawford. Between 1951 and 1954 she assisted in the production of the film Foreign Intrigue, starring Robert Mitchum.

While she was involved with the 1957 CBS series Dick and the Duchess, starring Patrick O’Neal and Richard Wattis, it was decided that they should produce a real-life Duke as a publicity stunt. They came up with the Duke of Bedford, who was presented to Nicole as a man who was anxious to promote his ancestral home and himself: “He does anything for publicity and loves being photographed,” she was told. The diffident Duke arrived, and was soon telling her of the collapse of his second marriage; not long afterwards he proposed. When Nicole accepted, the notorious Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, cabled the Duke: “Why marry her when you can have me?”

The Duke and Nicole married at Woburn Abbey in a blaze of publicity on September 2 1960. Although British high society was always a little wary of the Duchess, finding her brash and even vulgar, and disdaining her habit of signing her letters “Nicole de Bedford”, she took to her role at Woburn with gusto, exhibiting considerable taste.

She later wrote: “It was obvious that the most important thing was to bring some organisation to Woburn... The head of the cleaning department quit on the spot as she said she had been trained by the Flying Duchess [the aviatrix and ornithologist married to the 11th Duke] and would not change any of her habits (which mostly included going downstairs once every hour for a cup of tea, to gossip about the weather and, I guess, the Abbey’s inhabitants).”

She summoned experts from France to catalogue the furniture and china. With the Duke, she designed new viewing rooms in the basement for their unique Sèvres collection, which they discovered hidden away in storage. They converted the unused stables into antique shops, renovated the sculpture gallery and created a restaurant. “I also covered the silk curtains with tulle netting,” she disclosed, “after I found some woman, walking through the Abbey’s public rooms, who was cutting pieces out of the silk curtains with a pair of scissors for souvenirs.”

The Duke and Duchess travelled the world to promote Woburn in lectures about the house, the park and their spectacular art collection. In 1970 they opened a safari park, with African wildlife.

The house became alive with guests: ambassadors, film stars, and business magnates such as Nubar Gulbenkian. The Duchess was always aware that Woburn, with its 120 rooms, 97 telephones and 565 windows, was her husband’s first love and she took it on “just like having another child to raise”.

In 1971, following a conversation between the Duke and his heir, it was decided that they would leave Woburn in 1974, handing over the estate to his son to protect it against death duties. The Duke was given a lump sum which, though generous at that time, did not last. They continued to travel, finding it hard to settle: in their first three years of self-imposed tax exile, they lived in France, Italy, Switzerland, Portugal and Monaco.

In later years there were occasional photographs of the Bedfords at some Monte Carlo gala, published in magazines such as Hola! and Point de Vue. The Duke died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in October 2002.

At the end of her life the Duchess lived in a small flat in Monte Carlo, and she died at the Princess Grace Hospital in the principality.

She is survived by her two sons and one daughter; another daughter predeceased her in 1998.